Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  Who could argue with that? So I arranged that B. Violet should do our next typesetting job and took the copy over there myself.

  The collective now had only four women, down from the six or seven they’d started out with, and some different faces. The thing that most surprised me the first time I went there was the neatness. All the typesetters and layout artists I knew worked in a rubble of sticky paper and tiny, lethal objects. But B. Violet was laid out as nicely as a piece of camera-ready copy. There were two modern photo-typesetting machines, two beautiful light tables, a small darkroom, lots of labeled shelves and even an area in front like a doctor’s waiting room, with graphics magazines and women’s newspapers on the table.

  I didn’t know the woman at the counter, but she was brisk and thorough and even friendly when she found out I was from Best Printing. She was a slowspeaking Texan, with a wad of gum, a pair of very long legs ending in scalloped boots, and movements as ropey as a cowgirl’s. Hadley was her name. We went over the type specifications together, and I was impressed that she seemed to grasp immediately what was wanted. She said she’d have it by the next day, and I went away very confident, pleased that Elena had pushed the issue.

  But Hadley wasn’t there the next day. Fran was; Fran, the oldest member of the collective and the one Ray had always complained about. If Hadley was the cowgirl out on the range, then Fran was the cactus she hitched her horse to: a tall thick barrel with a thatch of skunk-like black and white hair and a hidefull of stickers, all pointing straight at me.

  “It’s not done,” Fran said immediately. “I don’t know how you can expect it to be done so soon.”

  She looked harassed. But she also looked like the kind of person who enjoys looking harassed—just so you’ll be sure to know how busy and important she is, and what an interruption your standing there and breathing is.

  “But Hadley told me it would be done today.”

  “Well, it’s Hadley’s day off. I could have done it this morning but your instructions just weren’t clear and I didn’t have the time to call you.”

  She had a low, gravelly voice that in some circumstances might have been pleasant enough, and a strongly featured face that would have been handsome if it hadn’t been so twisted with bad temper.

  I could tell I was getting mad by the way my voice came out. Penny calls it the “robot-teacher voice”: slow, overly well-enunciated, unemotional. “Bring out the copy,” I said. “My instructions were perfectly clear and I’ll show you.”

  And they were perfectly clear—as I had written them. But someone else, Hadley, I was afraid, had re-marked them so my meaning was confusing.

  “If you’d used a red pen in the first place and hadn’t changed your mind so much this wouldn’t have happened,” Fran growled, unwilling to take any blame at all.

  The robot-teacher voice said, “I’m going now. I will be back at four o’clock to pick it up.”

  It got done, but with no love lost on either side. And these were the people, the incompetent, unpleasant women of B. Violet, that Elena was suggesting join our collective?

  Penny spoke for me. “What? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Are you going to let me explain or not?” Elena asked, over her nervousness now and seemingly imperturbable. It wasn’t for nothing she’d been a high school teacher. She was used to getting around outright rejection and ridicule: “What? Me write an essay on Emily Dickinson, you gotta be kidding.”

  Everyone looked at her. I noticed that, unconsciously, arms had crossed and faces had set.

  “Now, I know you all think I know nothing about printing and it’s true, in a way, that I’m new and ignorant. But maybe, being new, I see some things that those of you who’ve been here longer don’t see.”

  Stony silence. I wanted to tell Elena to drop it, at least for tonight. There were times when we could all stand a bit of lecturing, but now wasn’t one of them.

  Elena went right ahead, however, flicking back a curly blond lock from her forehead. “I think we waste a lot of time, and money too, not having a typesetting machine. Look at all those trips to the typesetters. And they make mistakes and you have to go back and get corrections. Or you suddenly need to add something else—one tiny word—and have to wait a day and a half for it. Isn’t that right?” She looked at Ray and smiled. “Isn’t it?”

  Reluctantly he had to nod his head. No use pretending that he didn’t sound off about the slowness or inaccuracy of our typesetters once or twice a week.

  “It’s a question of simple efficiency,” said Elena smoothly. “Now I happen to know that B. Violet is in the opposite fix.”

  “What fix?” muttered Penny, but she didn’t interrupt.

  “They’ve got the equipment—two machines, a whole darkroom setup with stat camera and everything—but not enough business. So you see, it’s perfect!”

  “Why don’t they have enough business?” June asked.

  “Hah,” said Ray. “Go visit them sometime. You’ll see.”

  Elena glared at him and said seriously to June, “The economy’s failing and you have to ask why they don’t have enough business?”

  “Yeah,” said June stubbornly.

  “Yeah,” repeated Penny. “Let’s at least be business-like about this proposal. I’d want to see quarterly statements, a balance sheet, net worth, a bunch of stuff before I even consider the idea.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said, remembering my duties as facilitator all of a sudden. “Elena has just brought up the idea. There are two questions to consider: would Best Printing be improved by having typesetting facilities is one of them. Can we discuss that?”

  Elena looked at me with surprised brown eyes. I could see she hadn’t expected to find an easy ally.

  “No! We wouldn’t be improved,” said Zee energetically, shaking her smooth black head like a bell. “Definitely not. We have too many people around here already, too many problems just doing our own work. What do we need another business for? It’s just another headache. That’s what I think.”

  “I agree,” said Ray. “You start getting people in here wanting typesetting and who knows where it will end? You can’t do everything under one roof. Are we going to start binding next? And don’t forget, Optimum Typesetters is just down the block. It’d be crazy to compete with them.”

  “That’s a good point,” I said.

  “What do we care about Optimum?” snapped Elena. “It’s just some man who owns it and pays his workers peanuts.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Stop trying to be so fair, Pamela,” Penny said.

  “I can’t help it, I’m facilitating.”

  “Facilitating nothing. This is a pointless discussion.”

  Jeremy spoke for the first time, leaning forward with a narrowing, puzzled expression in his blue eyes. He forgot to look cute and spaced out and seemed almost angry. “Well, I’m against it. I mean, I’m a guy, right? I mean, and no offense, Elena, but what’s to prevent these women from taking over and getting rid of me and Ray?”

  “Oh Christ,” said Elena, tense and suddenly close to tears. “What is your problem, Jeremy? Look, I never would have brought this up if they hadn’t asked me to.”

  Penny was up in arms. “Why you? Why didn’t they arrange a meeting with us, write a formal letter or something?”

  “Yeah,” said June, “how’d you get involved in all this?”

  “Because I…because,” Elena paused, unable to stop herself from turning bright red. “Because Fran is my lover now, that’s why! Satisfied?” She jumped up and ran out of the shop, slamming the door.

  We were all silent. I heard the rain pour down violently outside and said, “Well, I guess that means the meeting’s over.”

  “Huh,” said June. “You can bet we haven’t heard the last of this.”

  3

  AFTER THE MEETING PENNY and I went home to make dinner. We had a couple of roommates, Sam and Jude, but they were gone that night, and so it was just
us, moving around the kitchen the way we had as kids.

  No wonder.

  It was the same kitchen.

  It’s funny—Seattle has become one of those trendy West Coast cities where every other person is from somewhere else. It’s a little déclassé, in fact, to admit that you were born here. I mean, what do you have to talk about then? You can’t be like the New Yorkers who miss the theater but love the slow pace, or like the Californians who bemoan the rain but admire the bus system. Sometimes it seems like every party you go to there are these little enclaves of expatriates: “Everybody from Manhattan take a seat; you from Pittsburgh, over there with the rest of them. Chicago, down front; Boston, upstairs. Seattle? No, nobody from Seattle here. Try the bowling alley.”

  But déclassé or not, Penny and I were born and raised here and seem to have a continuity that most people we know lack. Take the house. Even though we both moved out independently when we were eighteen and nineteen and didn’t come back here to live until we were twenty-five, and even though the pink bedroom upstairs was now ivory and the bunkbeds were in the basement, the house was full of reminders of our youth. Scuffmarks, stains, broken things that had never gotten fully repaired; a door that hadn’t been the same on its hinges since Penny had tied one of my front teeth to a string and slammed it (the tooth stuck to its gums); cracked cups, glued back together and still holding twenty years later; books with scribbled covers, wallpaper with the design filled in with ink; drawers full of scorched potholders, faded Girl Scout badges, burst necklaces.

  It wasn’t only our reminders either; our parents left their own—just not such violent ones. Our dad’s Sunday paintings of cows and barns were still on the walls and Mom’s collection of laughable and lovely cream pitchers still lined the dining room window sills.

  People have asked us how we could want to live here after the accident. As if it were ghoulish or something. I think only those who were never close to their families at all could say that. Or maybe it’s the way it happened. It’s not like Mom or Dad grew into old age, became querulous and senile, or had a chance to take leave of their possessions and their memories. No, they simply vanished one day, smashed up in a head-on collision on the freeway, dead immediately.

  I suppose our moving back into the house was one way of remembering them, living with them a little longer. Or letting them live. I don’t find that macabre in the least.

  And there were definitely advantages. The house was paid for and in good condition, except for the aforementioned scuffs and stains. We didn’t have to buy a thing, and for two young women in the midst of disengaging themselves from scholarly pursuits in order to run a business, this was no mean relief.

  We were happy there. At ease. It was obvious in the way we crossed and recrossed the kitchen, knowing the places of things, their history and meaning.

  But I suppose the smoothness came from being twins too. I was working on sautéing the eggplant, just starting to think spices, when Penny swooped over with basil and oregano. “Let’s add red wine to the sauce,” she said, and then saw I’d already got the bottle out. It was always like that, but still we could marvel and laugh. We were different enough that outside our home we could sometimes forget our connection; inside, here, especially performing the familiar acts, there was something seamless, true.

  “So does this mean the end of Elena or the beginning of a whole new chapter in the history of Best Printing?” Penny asked, tasting away and liberally adding more red wine to the spaghetti sauce.

  She sounded more flippant than I suspected she felt. Elena’s departure had left a sour, embarrassed taste in my mouth, that I hadn’t been able to analyze yet.

  “She seemed really upset, didn’t she?” I said tentatively. “Like we were going to trash her or something.”

  “But Pam, if she’d just said that in the beginning, about being lovers with Fran…” Penny stirred the pot impatiently while I got out two glasses. As long as we were cooking with wine, we might as well drink it. I had a feeling that this discussion required a certain degree of inebriation.

  “I don’t think she really wanted that to be known—at least not so we’d be influenced.”

  “Of course we’d be influenced, now or later. It would have to come out. And we have a right to know.”

  “But how are we being influenced, that’s definitely a question we have to ask ourselves.”

  “It would be the same if Fran were a man,” Penny declared, draining her glass. “Worse, in fact. Because then you’d know for sure that he was using Elena to get into Best Printing.”

  “Penny! Is that what you really think? That Elena’s being used?”

  “Well.” She looked a little ashamed. “Maybe not. But the alternative is that Elena herself is trying to cause trouble.”

  I poured us both more wine. “No, the alternative is that Elena thinks it’s a good idea, and only happens to be lovers with Fran.”

  “Elena and her good ideas!” Penny burst out. “I’m sick of Elena and her good ideas. Ever since she came it’s been nothing but ‘let’s do it this way,’ or ‘I think we should do it that way.’ She doesn’t give us any credit for having made decisions in the past about the best way to do things—she acts like we just fell into this.”

  “Well, didn’t we?” I couldn’t help laughing. Penny on her high horse was always inexpressibly funny to me. Her big purple glasses were steamed up from the water boiling in the spaghetti pot and her punk hair stood on end.

  “Pamela.” She looked severely at me. “There’s no need after four years to pretend we know nothing about what we’re doing. That’s what women always do, act modest and dumb, don’t take credit for what they’ve accomplished…”

  “Oh, come off it. I read that book too. And besides, I happen to think that some of Elena’s ideas have been good ones. Like having someone do a thorough inventory every week. If we’re so smart, how come we never thought of that?—the way we’d run out of things and have to rush off and buy some more.”

  “It’s not that easy always to anticipate what you’ll need,” Penny muttered defensively, dumping in the stalks of spaghetti. “Okay,” she said suddenly, turning to face me. “That was a good idea. But what about some of the others—the filing system that meant buying a whole new set-up that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, and Elena wanting to go to all those conferences at our expense so she could supposedly make job contacts for us—money down the drain. And that’s what any association with B. Violet would be too—money down the drain, maybe even bankruptcy—” Penny flung out a hand dramatically, knocking over her wine. “But anyway, trouble,” she said more calmly, mopping it up. “Hell, those women can’t manage their own finances, they’d drag us down too.”

  As often happened, the more Penny tried to convince me, an already sympathetic listener, the more I started to pick holes in her argument. There’s something graphic about someone who looks like you and who you’ve known all your life setting forth an idea so vehemently. You see how silly it looks. But then, I was always far less positive and self-assured than Penny. A carper from the word go. After Mom and Dad died I was completely set against the idea of working at the shop ourselves. All those boring weekends when we were kids, hanging around making paper dolls out of the scrap and sweeping up for a quarter—forget it, dump the business right away.

  But Penny was against the idea too, and listening to her go on and on about what a mistake it would be to get involved, how much better it would be to hand it all over to other people, etc., I couldn’t help but become convinced that it would be the best thing in the world for us to take the shop over.

  We were always haggling back and forth, convincing each other and occasionally ourselves. It was so routine usually that it was like talking to yourself in the bathtub. But tonight there was something else in the air, something more than Elena’s system of filing or her wanting to go to yet another feminist conference. Penny gave vent to it when we were halfway through our spaghetti a
nd eggplant and more than halfway through our bottle of wine.

  “Okay,” she said. “Much as I think Jeremy put it badly tonight, there’s truth to what he said. Why would the women from B. Violet, having left a mixed collective, want to join another one? What would that mean for us, and for Ray and Jeremy, or any other men who want to join?”

  “We could have had an all-women’s collective,” I said. “Almost did. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Ray about then and Jeremy hadn’t walked in the door the day that Kay said she was quitting…”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Penny. “You know we didn’t think like that. About being a women’s collective. I mean, it’s not that we’re politically unsophisticated…”

  She looked at me for confirmation. I shrugged.

  “We’re feminists…” she went on. “We know all about women working together, creating their own spaces, taking control of their lives. I mean, we’re two women who’ve known each other all our lives…”

  “It would have been difficult not to.”

  “The point is, Pammy,” she said with dignity, the dignity of half a bottle of wine. “We think it’s necessary to struggle together—with men, not apart. We may get down on men occasionally, but we’re not man-haters.”

  “That’s not what I heard you say last week. And I think that straight women hate men a lot more. They have more reason and more opportunity.”

  “Doug and I are just having a cooling off period,” Penny said, staring vaguely at the dregs of the empty bottle. “In fact, I was thinking of calling him tonight.”

  “You’re better off without him, Pen.”

  “You would say that. But ever since Ray you just haven’t made the attempt anymore.”

  “You make it sound like parachute jumping…Maybe you’re not so far wrong.”

  “Seriously, Pam,” (Penny was always using judicious adverbs like that. I never knew where she got it from.) “It’s been almost a year now since you’ve been involved with anyone. You’re not still thinking about Ray, are you?”